It's a Mystery to Me

I was never a big mystery reader, except in my youth when I read (and re-read) all the Nancy Drew mysteries I could get my hands on. After that I went into a slump (studiously avoiding the mystery genre while I read required and not-so-required authors) that lasted until the day a library patron's excitement for Sherlock Holmes infected me with a growing appreciation for that great detective. In the 1970s, the Scowrers & Molly Maguires, a Sherlockian club in San Francisco, donated the Sherlock Holmes Collection to the San Francisco Public Library. This non-circulating collection of about 250 books and periodicals is open to everyone, and resides in the Book Arts & Special Collections Center on the Sixth Floor of the Main Library. The fact that we had acquired a collection with which I needed to be familiar was additional encouragement to read the novels and stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

After reading Sherlock Holmes, I had a renewed interest in mystery fiction. Since then, I've developed my own personal shortlist of favorite writers and sleuths. I discovered the detectives I love best are brave, resourceful women who celebrate and act upon their intuition as well as their smarts. A growing cluster of writers have created female protagonists, where there weren't many when I was growing up; was that the reason I went into a mystery-reading slump in the first place? These days they're everywhere: it's thrilling to read the adventures of feisty women, getting into and out of scrapes, solving everything except perhaps their own personal problems, and best yet, offering a blend of folk wisdom and logic to the resolution of whatever they happen to be investigating. They are wellsprings of humor and insight for everyday people, in action-packed stories of domestic and international intrigue. These clue-hunters bring a blissful calm at the end of the workday; I often find my favorite detectives bring something else---a therapeutic solution to some of my own mysteries. Art does imitate life, or at least mirrors life, even if it's still a mystery to me.

Here are a few favorite writers and their detectives:

Cara Black. Aimée Leduc

Sue Grafton. Kinsey Millhone

Alexander McCall Smith. Precious Ramotswe

Winspear, Jacqueline. Maisie Dobbs

You can find these and more mysteries at your local library. This post concludes our mystery-related tie-ins with the July/August issue of the San Francisco Interest NextReads Newsletter. We'll be posting tie-ins to the Sept./Oct. issue in the near future, so stay tuned!

Cover and end paper designs from
  The Mystery of the Ivory Charm by Carolyn Keene (1936)
Courtesy Effie Lee Morris Historical Children's Collection, SFPL